Most of us know that the U.S. Senate has passed an energy bill that dictates a 35-mpg Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) for all vehicles, cars and trucks, by 2020, and the House will likely follow. But how many understand what that means?

I'll bet the technologically challenged lawmakers who voted for that standard, like their accomplices in the mainstream media and the vast majority of the public, believe it means the same kinds of cars and trucks they enjoy today will get much better mileage down the road. How hard could it be to move from today's long-established 27.5-mpg car CAFE to 35 miles per gallon, a mere 7.5-mpg (27-percent) increase?

Almost no one outside the fuel-economy business understands how incredibly tough, probably impossible, and enormously expensive that really would be. Even Toyota - whose hybrid-boosted 2006 car and truck CAFEs were 34.4 and 23.7 mpg, respectively - calls the 35-mpg standard "very aggressive" and "difficult to meet," adding that, "the time frame is too soon."

GM says that to bring all vehicles up to 35 mpg - a totally absurd 58-percent increase for light trucks, now at 22.2 mpg - represents a combined 40-percent boost that would cost more than $100 billion, "the greatest regulatory cost ever imposed on a single industry."

The only way it could come even close to happening would be to dieselize and hybridize virtually everything - at an incremental cost (not retail price) of $5000-$8000 per vehicle -and downsize trucks to where they could barely haul the content of a homeless auto worker's shopping cart. New emissions standards are making diesels way more expensive, and there's not enough battery raw material on the planet for an all-hybrid fleet.